“Desperate Housewives”  It’s the funny, satirical, and often profound look at the lives of four gorgeous upscale housewives who live, along with a surprisingly large number of to-die-for boyfriends, husbands, and exes, on deceptively charming Wisteria Lane.

The four housewives are, in addition to being beautiful, pencil-thin.  And such thinness is the norm for Hollywood, so “Desperate Housewives” is just one of a hundred dramas establishing a standard for acceptable body image among Hollywood’s female audience.

The problem arises when members of that female audience, for reasons not yet fully understood, take the Hollywood body image too much to heart, and, in an attempt to achieve it, develop eating disorders.

Bulimia nervosa is one such disorder.  But, unlike the related anorexia nervosa, whose sufferers develop an overpowering aversion to food, bulimia allows, or rather, compels, its victims to eat to the point of insensibility, and then purge themselves by vomiting, using of laxatives, exercising to the point of exhaustion, or all three.